This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

Woe is them: Debauched revels of a dying American civilization

The first illusion is that this book is actually concerned with the end of literacy and the triumph of spectacle.

Chris Hedges, once a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the New York Times, only occasionally alludes to the illusion makers, to illiteracy and spectacle.

His real topic is the moral and political collapse of the United States and its threatened takeover by a coalition of amoral corporate powers and fascist fundamentalist Christians.

Does Hedges really believe this second American Revolution is coming? Should we close our borders to black-shirted cross bearers, despite the inconvenience that would cause innocent clergy?

Not just yet. Hedges believes this stuff enough to say it – as much as Ann Coulter believes that all liberals are traitors and ought to be sent to Alcatraz – but in America a gap has opened between saying and believing. Out of this hyperbole gap has emerged America's fastest-growing industry during these recessionary times, the outrage business.

The modern outrage business – the profitable publication of jeremiads – actually goes back at least to William Bennett's foxily titled 1998 book, The Death of Outrage: Bill Clinton and the Assault on American Ideals. But judging by the stuff that was written about Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington when they were around, it actually has a more enduring history.

The ground rules for the outrage business are simple:

Article Continued Below

Rule 1: Every statement should be an absolute; qualifications that reflect the complexities of reality weaken the rhetorical effect.

Rule 2: The motivations of others should always be demonstrated to be much, much darker than they appear, diabolical if possible.

Rule 3: While things should always be characterized as steadily worsening, it must be made clear that they are about to get much, much worse.

It is a little unfair just to beat up on Hedges. It's not as if he has been lapping up the outrage gravy anything like the pack of radio and television ghouls of the U.S. Right.

No doubt, the moral horror this former Harvard Divinity School seminarian feels at online pornography, most episodes of The Jerry Springer Show and the tawdry theatrics of the World Wrestling Federation, is genuine. He's displayed similar alarm in his previous bestsellers, War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning and American Fascists.

It's the conclusion Hedges draws this time that feels less authentic, or at least less reliable.

Hedges argues that Springer and those other examples are instances of moral collapse, produced through the systematic brutalization of Americans by corporations that operate without regard to human life, the social good or the environment. They are signs of cultural endtime.

"The worse reality becomes, the less a beleaguered population wants to hear about it, and the more it distracts itself with squalid pseudo-events, celebrity breakdowns, gossip and trivia," Hedges writes.

"These are the debauched revels of a dying civilization."

Good line, that: "debauched revels of a dying civilization." It's just the sort of thing Pat Robertson would have said. But does it pass the credibility test? Not so much.

Stop, you may say. Surely Hedges has lightened up since the defeat of the Great Satan, George W. Bush, and the election of Barak Obama. But no. In Hedgesworld, all members of the political, economic and media elite are spineless slugs (see Rule 1 about absolutes).

Besides, the financial meltdown has ended all hope.

"The daily bleeding of thousands of jobs will soon turn our economic crisis into a political crisis ...," according to Hedges. (See Rule 3.)

"When the Obama administration is exposed as a group of mortals waving a sword at a tidal wave, the United States could plunge into a long period of precarious social and political instability."

So why does it matter up here? It matters because this stuff seeps into Canadian life. If you see some of the reader comments that come to thestar.com every day, you will appreciate how effectively the web has globalized incivility, political paranoia and a unique American framing of political and social issues.

To a large extent, the culture wars in the U.S. today are a product of its own culture industry. As Hedges correctly points out – without acknowledging his own co-optation – they are a distraction from the real issues.

Here in Canada, that is doubly true. We have our own indigenous issues, serious issues, to address – challenges of poverty, of the distribution of wealth and power, of social justice.

To confuse our material and cultural issues with theirs is to welcome colonization by their concerns. That would indeed make us just another dependency in the American empire of illusion.

John Cruickshank is the publisher of the Toronto Star and a former publisher of the Chicago Sun-Times.

More from The Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com